Organizations are increasingly implementing and relying on internal systems that function over a wide-base infrastructure, such as intranets. When problems occur that are related to the use of such systems, members of the organization and other users that have access to the systems, such as employees and customers, may typically call or send a message to a helpdesk or support center run by a support staff in order to seek assistance. Once a user reports a problem or requests assistance to solve a problem, a member of the support staff may generate a trouble ticket to log the report or request. The support staff then investigates the problem that is affecting the user, which is often related to an infrastructure outage or some sort of planned or unplanned diminished service. For example, an employee attempting to use a printer connected to a network may experience difficulty when attempting to print a document. The employee may not completely understand the problem, but has enough knowledge that he or she may provide a general description of the problem (e.g., “the printer on the third floor is not printing”) to an IT support staff member, who then generates a report. Eventually, one or more support staff members are assigned to investigate and ultimately resolve the printer problem.
While there are several different categories of helpdesk requests (e.g., how to, request for change, break/fix, etc.), industry reports reflect that infrastructure outages typically make up a significant percentage of total helpdesk requests (approximately eighteen percent of all helpdesk requests). Often, where a problem is related to an infrastructure outage or diminished service of a system or subsystem, the support staff may already have knowledge of the problem, yet have no way to convey such knowledge to others within the organization. For example if the problem with the networked printer described in the above-cited example was related to a planned maintenance outage, several employees may be experiencing problems with one or more printers on the network. Although the support staff already knows of the problem, its members may be left to respond to multiple requests for assistance. Receiving large numbers of these types of service requests often prevents the support staff from addressing other issues and results in inefficient use of the organization's resources. Recent industry reports estimate that each service request contact costs an organization an average of sixteen dollars.
While various mechanisms, such as electronic mail alert messages and postings on intranet home pages, are available to alert users that a problem has been acknowledged by the support staff, such alerts may often go unnoticed and the support staff will nonetheless receive multiple service requests or problem reports.
It would be desirable to have a tool that notifies a user of a system about known problems and outages in that system at the time that the user proceeds to report a problem that the user is experiencing or request some sort of assistance.